On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 8,000 farmworkers and their supporters crossed Tower Bridge in Sacramento, California to mark the last leg of a 340-mile march north from the Southern Central Valley town of Delano. The demonstration was launched by the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) at the behest of its leader, Cesar Chavez, to call attention to an ongoing strike of 2,000 workers against planters in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The marchers walked through 33 cities despite police harassment, and gathered strength and international attention as farmworkers and students joined the march along the way. When marchers reached the state capital, Democratic Governor Pat Brown refused to grant them an audience.
The “March to Sacramento” took place in the context of the emerging radicalization of the working class, students, and sections of the middle class in the United States and internationally. On March 25, as the marchers walked through the California spring, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in dozens of US cities in the largest protests to date against the US war in Vietnam, which President Lyndon Johnson pledged to intensify in his state of the union address earlier that year. In January, fire bombings organized by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi killed civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer. Not a year had passed since Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama and the first major urban riots of the 1960s in Watts, California.
Fifty years have passed since the march brought international attention to the plight of California’s farmworkers, the NFWA (reconstituted in 1972 as the United Farm Workers Union), and Chavez. In the United States, and particularly in its westernmost states, an official myth of Chavez has been cultivated in the years since his death in 1993. He was posthumously granted the Congressional Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and dozens of schools and public buildings today bear his name. Many western states recognize “Cesar Chavez Day” by closing schools and state offices on March 31, Chavez’ birthday. He is today celebrated by the ruling class as a model of Catholic asceticism, peaceful protest, and Latino racialism.
Chavez emerged amid a series of militant strikes in the mid-1960s by thousands of farmworkers in California’s San Joaquin, Salinas, and Imperial valleys, as well as Arizona. Picketers defended themselves from sheriffs’ departments and thugs hired by the growers who beat strikers, sprayed their families with pesticides, and killed several workers in violent confrontations.
Workers repeatedly ignored court injunctions, and wildcat strikes against poverty wages and horrendous working conditions were common. Strikers were typically arrested for speaking in support of the strike movement. On one widely publicized occasion, police officers in Kern County arrested picketers for reading passages from socialist author Jack London and demanded the arrest of London. Much to their disappointment did the police learn that they could not arrest Jack London—he had been dead for 50 years!
Chavez was a ruthless negotiator and adept publicist who modeled himself on the politics of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, the mysticism of Mexican mestizo Catholicism, and the legend of the Mexican revolutionary generals Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. The Arizona-born child of Mexican immigrants, Chavez experienced foreclosure when his family lost their small adobe home in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929. After moving to California, Cesar Chavez dropped out of school in the seventh grade and began working under backbreaking conditions as a farmworker.
In 1952, while working in a San Jose lumberyard, the 25-year-old Chavez was introduced to Fred Ross, the founder of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit named the Community Service Organization. A close confidant of the anti-communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation, Ross became Chavez’ tutor, offering him a staff position primarily in charge of registering Mexican-Americans to vote for the Democratic Party.
After discussions with Alinsky and Ross, Chavez moved in 1962 to Delano, a mid-sized town at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, with the aim of establishing community organizations for farmworkers to provide loans, carry out voter registration, and expand access to social programs. As Chavez said at the time in a letter to Ross, Chavez sought to make clear “that this is not a union and that we are not involved in strikes.”
The agricultural strike wave of the 1960s
In 1965, a strike of Filipino farm workers in Delano forced Chavez to support calls by Mexican workers to honor picket lines and strike. Where previous strikes had been easily defeated by the growers, a considerable fear of unrest spread throughout the ruling class of California. A 1965 newsletter from the California Council of Growers expressed the worry that “the civil rights forces have taken over, although they continue to use Chavez and his Farm Workers Association as a front. The lesson to be learned from Delano is that this is not an isolated case; that it will be continued, and that other areas of the state can expect similar efforts as crops are ready.”
Edward R. Murrow’s famous 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame” had exposed the backbreaking and deeply impoverished conditions under which 2 to 3 million farmworkers labored, and as the strike continued into 1966, broad sections of the working class began to sympathize with the farmworkers’ struggle. At the end of 1965, as Chavez emerged as the strike’s spokesman, he entered into a formal agreement with the AFL-CIO and UAW President Walter Reuther, who flew to Delano and worked with Chavez to ensure that the explosive struggle of the farmworkers remained within the acceptable framework of contract negotiation.
Chavez’ doctrine of asceticism, boycott, and fasting developed in a conscious effort to limit the emergence of the class struggle and prevent a social explosion. Chavez’ proposal to launch a boycott of table grapes in 1965, and his call for a march to Sacramento, were conceived of as alternatives to the possibility of a valley-wide general strike of agricultural workers, a notion that had widespread support among militant workers.
“We begin to believe that this is the time for a real movement among farmworkers to begin,” Chavez wrote in 1965. “And people are beginning to talk about the Movement instead of a strike.” Moreover, Chavez saw the explosive character of the CIO movement of the 1930s as a dangerous warning: “We don’t want to model ourselves on industrial unions; that would be bad. We want to get involved in politics, in voter registration, not just contract negotiation.”
Chavez announced the call for a demonstration after a series of Senate hearings that took place in Delano regarding the strike and farmworkers’ unionization efforts. In attendance at the instigation of Walter Reuther was New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy, who subjected growers and local police to intensive questioning and became Chavez’s closest collaborator in the Democratic Party.
In part due to widespread support for the plight of farmworkers and in part due to growing militancy and strikes, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was called in by agribusiness to pre-empt the strike movement. In June 1966, the Teamsters signed eight sellout contracts with growers up and down the San Joaquin valley. When Teamster truck drivers refused to ship scab products, union officials ordered their members off the job and brought scabs to ship the goods.
This campaign marked an initial stage in what became a universal phenomenon: the trade union bureaucracy actively serving as strikebreakers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Teamsters officials brutally attacked organizers and farmworkers aligned with the United Farm Workers. At times, Teamsters resorted to violence, attacking farmworker pickets as police looked on.
Chavez launched his first fast in 1968 in an attempt to bring under control a wave of strike agitation against company, Teamster and police violence against farmworkers. As strikes spread, workers had solicited the help of plumbers to disable the refrigeration units on freight trains, ensuring food picked by scab laborers would rot before reaching US and world markets. Longshoremen at California ports also refused to handle scab goods after receiving appeals from farmworkers.
After speaking to Chavez as he began fasting in February, one Chavez aide said: “The most important thing that he said, in my opinion, was that we as a union and as a movement have aroused the hopes and aspirations of poor people … and we have a duty and responsibility to those people … we cannot by resorting to violence crush their hopes and destroy what we have done.”
On March 10, 1968, Chavez heeded medical advice and ended his fast after having requested that Robert Kennedy fly to Delano to mark its conclusion. It was on the flight from Los Angeles that Kennedy told close staff members he would run for president. That same day, Kennedy addressed a rally of thousands of farmworkers and shared bread with Chavez to break the fast.
Two days later, President Johnson was nearly defeated in the New Hampshire Democratic primary as the Tet Offensive caused opposition to the Vietnam War to become a groundswell. On March 16, Kennedy publicly announced his candidacy and requested that Chavez serve as a delegate to the Democratic primary. Chavez agreed and rammed through an official endorsement by the UFW, which played a crucial role in turning out support for Kennedy’s California primary victory. Six weeks later, Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Chavez served as a pallbearer at Kennedy’s funeral.
The strike against Delano growers came to an end in 1970 as the UFW secured a collective bargaining agreement. By the end of the 1970s, the UFW boasted over 50,000 members and exercised considerable control over industry standards for hiring, wages, and conditions. Certain significant gains had been made, like the replacement of short-handled hoes and raised wages. But as Hollis Roberts, one of California’s largest growers, said after signing a UFW contract: “I learned to like Chavez and I found that a lot of things we had been told about these people were not true. I had been told they were Communists, and I had been advised never to talk to them in person…Now, I don’t think we could have been any more wrong.”
Chavez sought the support of state government to prop up the union’s position. After the 1974 gubernatorial elections, when Democrat Jerry Brown succeeded Republican Ronald Reagan, Chavez formed a close relationship with the Democratic administration. This culminated in the passage in 1975 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which established a legal framework guaranteeing a position for the UFW officialdom, even as most farmworkers continued to live and work under truly desperate conditions.
In return for this state sponsorship, Chavez and the UFW leadership poured hundreds of thousands of dollars in workers’ dues money into the California Democratic Party. In two years alone, the UFW contributed $750,000 to campaign committees of Democratic powerbroker and San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown.
To be continued
This is the second of a two-part article on Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union.
Anti-communist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic
The Gandhi-like image that Chavez sought to cultivate was a pacifist mask to disguise—as it had for the Indian leader himself—a reactionary political program. Gandhi sought to pressure British imperialism into a settlement with the Indian bourgeoisie that would forestall a revolutionary upheaval of the Indian masses. Chavez sought to appeal to sections of the American bourgeoisie to make concessions that would prevent a mass radicalization among the farmworkers.
Chavez launched his political career on the basis of anti-communism. In 1967, he opened the first “purge” of the farmworker movement expelling and shaming “disloyal” members. In particular, farmworkers and organizers who raised opposition to Chavez’s orientation toward the Democratic Party and his alliance with Reuther and the AFL-CIO were kicked out of the union on trumped-up charges of sympathy for communism.
Chavez’s anti-communism was bound-up with a fierce American nationalism. Contrary to popular belief, Chavez was a strong opponent of unifying Mexican and American workers. To the contrary, he possessed a deep personal and political hatred of immigrant workers.
In the early 1970s, Chavez and the UFW set up a little-known operation titled the “Wet Line.” Under this sordid practice, UFW leadership sent teams of thugs to attack, beat, and rob migrant workers attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. The title for the operation came from the derogatory term “wetback” used for migrant workers, because so many of them waded or swam across the Rio Grande.
The UFW spent $80,000 a week on the “Wet Line” operation. According to official protests lodged by Mexican trade unionists, hundreds of workers were attacked and tortured by UFW gangs. Houses of migrants were firebombed, cars were set alight, and workers were whipped, disrobed, cut, and left for dead in the cold desert night. Two men were castrated by UFW thugs while others were drowned. Tapes of UFW executive board meetings proved that Chavez conspired with his cousin, Manuel Chavez, to bribe Mexican officials to attack Mexican workers so the UFW could cut expenses for their terroristic campaign against immigrants.
Also in the 1970s, Chavez developed the “Illegals Campaign” by which he sought to scapegoat migrant workers for a series of defeats suffered by the UFW as workers grew disillusioned with UFW-negotiated sellout contracts. Chavez attacked the Nixon administration and US Border Patrol for their ostensibly lax immigration policy and set out to compile lists of undocumented workers that the UFW wanted to expose to the government for deportation. In one impoverished neighborhood of Fresno, Chavez claimed he had a list of 2,200 undocumented workers who he was prepared to denounce for deportation.
Chavez’s militant xenophobia undercuts his well-advertised image of non-violence and pacifism. “They’re wets, you know,” he once told his sidekick, Dolores Huerta. “They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”
Chavez’s nationalism and anti-communism paved the way for the emergence of more openly anti-democratic and corrupt currents in the UFW. Further purges were organized against farmworkers and organizers who Chavez vilified because they opposed his authoritarianism from the left. When nine farmworkers sued Chavez for expelling them from elected positions, Chavez filed a spurious libel lawsuit alleging $25 million in damages, far beyond what the farmworkers possessed. He later acknowledged this was an effort to intimidate the workers’ lawyer.
In 1981, during a factional fight for control of the union, Chavez also distributed a leaflet denouncing two Jewish members of the opposing faction as “the two Jews.” The leaflet said there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the union and Chavez’s wife, Helen, shouted death threats from the convention floor. The targets of the threats were supporters of UFW lawyers Marshall Ganz and Jerry Cohen.
The UFW collapses
During the 1980s, the UFW lost the vast majority of its contracts as thousands of workers left the union or voted for decertification. The political climate had shifted against the union, in the wake of the 1981 destruction of the PATCO strike by the Reagan administration, the isolation and defeat of militant struggles at Phelps Dodge Copper, Greyhound, Eastern Airlines, Hormel and dozens of other locations.
In California, Republican George Deukmejian won the governorship in 1982, and the state government passed to Republican Party control for the next 16 years, undermining the principal prop for the UFW, the corporatist structure established under the Agriculture Labor Relations Act. When disputes arose, the state automatically sided with the growers, and the union consistently capitulated.
As the UFW lost its dues base, it transformed itself from a union into a business under the banner of “Latino empowerment.” In the 1980s, the UFW opened a print shop and contracted with the Democratic Party to print mailers and newsletters for its candidates. Chavez made a secret agreement with millionaire real estate developer Celestino Aguilar to purchase foreclosed houses and flip them for profit. Aguilar and the UFW established American Liberty Investments to develop apartments in the Central Valley and set up the Ideal Minimart Corporation to construct strip malls and a check-cashing store. The UFW had become a housing vulture and central valley slumlord.
Millions of dollars in the UFW’s “Martin Luther King” pension plan were invested in Aguilar’s real estate developing projects, with Chavez’s younger brother Richard receiving millions in construction contracts. As Miriam Pawel writes in her book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, “By 1989, the Martin Luther King Jr. fund [MLK] was a private foundation with $8 million in principal, effectively accountable to no one but Cesar Chavez. Each year, MLK doled out between $600,000 and $700,000 to other UFW-related enterprises. Money earned by a generation of farmworkers, who had been told their sacrifice would provide services for all farmworkers, had become a subsidy for a growing bureaucracy increasingly removed from the fields.”
As his organization collapsed and lost legitimacy in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, Chavez spent the last years of his life charging almost $4,000 per event to speak at dozens of college campuses across the world. His speeches included calls for students to register to vote for the Democratic Party.
Today, conditions for the 2 to 3 million farmworkers are little changed from before the UFW emerged on the scene. Over half of all farmworkers are undocumented and the median income for all farmworkers is just $7,500 per year. Child labor is legal in agriculture, with 12-year-olds forced to work long days. Because most farmworkers are undocumented, they are not eligible for US social programs. Only 2 percent of farmworkers use Social Security, and less than 15 percent receive Medicaid.
Piece rate payment is legal under US labor law for agricultural workers, with orange pickers in Florida paid just 85 cents for each 90-pound box of oranges they fill. Federal minimum wage laws do not apply to one-third of farmworkers on smaller farms, and wage theft by foremen and growers is regular. Today, there are thousands of agricultural workers who are not paid for their work and are essentially modern slaves. Sexual harassment of female farmworkers is widespread.
Poor conditions are not just for farmworkers. Poverty in agricultural areas of the country has skyrocketed in recent years for all sections of the working class. According to the 2010 US Census, California’s Central Valley is one of the poorest regions of the US. Fresno is the second poorest metropolitan region of the US, while Bakersfield-Delano and Modesto are the fourth and fifth poorest. Each area was once a center of UFW activity. Meanwhile, profits for the California agricultural industry are reaching new records. In 2013, revenue reached $34 billion—the highest figure ever.
Conclusion
The development of a mass movement of agricultural workers independent of the corporatist unions and the two parties of big business today requires a critical appraisal of the myth of the UFW and Cesar Chavez. Farmworkers are entitled to feel proud of their past victories in struggles against California growers, the police, and the courts, but they should not confuse this with illusions in the legacy of the UFW or Cesar Chavez. What failed was not this or that tactical method, but the essentially pro-capitalist character of his program.
Farmworkers hold the key to an agricultural industry without which the economy of the world’s most powerful capitalist country cannot function. But the fight against inequality and poverty requires the building of a political movement that places central emphasis on the unity of migrant workers with not only their permanent resident and naturalized coworkers but with the American working class as a whole.
Today, the UFW is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Sacramento with a series of radio advertisements encouraging workers to register to vote to elect Democratic Party candidates from “our race.”
[Part One] [Part Two]
This is the second of a two-part article on Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union.
Anti-communist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic
The Gandhi-like image that Chavez sought to cultivate was a pacifist mask to disguise—as it had for the Indian leader himself—a reactionary political program. Gandhi sought to pressure British imperialism into a settlement with the Indian bourgeoisie that would forestall a revolutionary upheaval of the Indian masses. Chavez sought to appeal to sections of the American bourgeoisie to make concessions that would prevent a mass radicalization among the farmworkers.
Chavez launched his political career on the basis of anti-communism. In 1967, he opened the first “purge” of the farmworker movement expelling and shaming “disloyal” members. In particular, farmworkers and organizers who raised opposition to Chavez’s orientation toward the Democratic Party and his alliance with Reuther and the AFL-CIO were kicked out of the union on trumped-up charges of sympathy for communism.
Chavez’s anti-communism was bound-up with a fierce American nationalism. Contrary to popular belief, Chavez was a strong opponent of unifying Mexican and American workers. To the contrary, he possessed a deep personal and political hatred of immigrant workers.
In the early 1970s, Chavez and the UFW set up a little-known operation titled the “Wet Line.” Under this sordid practice, UFW leadership sent teams of thugs to attack, beat, and rob migrant workers attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. The title for the operation came from the derogatory term “wetback” used for migrant workers, because so many of them waded or swam across the Rio Grande.
The UFW spent $80,000 a week on the “Wet Line” operation. According to official protests lodged by Mexican trade unionists, hundreds of workers were attacked and tortured by UFW gangs. Houses of migrants were firebombed, cars were set alight, and workers were whipped, disrobed, cut, and left for dead in the cold desert night. Two men were castrated by UFW thugs while others were drowned. Tapes of UFW executive board meetings proved that Chavez conspired with his cousin, Manuel Chavez, to bribe Mexican officials to attack Mexican workers so the UFW could cut expenses for their terroristic campaign against immigrants.
Also in the 1970s, Chavez developed the “Illegals Campaign” by which he sought to scapegoat migrant workers for a series of defeats suffered by the UFW as workers grew disillusioned with UFW-negotiated sellout contracts. Chavez attacked the Nixon administration and US Border Patrol for their ostensibly lax immigration policy and set out to compile lists of undocumented workers that the UFW wanted to expose to the government for deportation. In one impoverished neighborhood of Fresno, Chavez claimed he had a list of 2,200 undocumented workers who he was prepared to denounce for deportation.
Chavez’s militant xenophobia undercuts his well-advertised image of non-violence and pacifism. “They’re wets, you know,” he once told his sidekick, Dolores Huerta. “They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”
Chavez’s nationalism and anti-communism paved the way for the emergence of more openly anti-democratic and corrupt currents in the UFW. Further purges were organized against farmworkers and organizers who Chavez vilified because they opposed his authoritarianism from the left. When nine farmworkers sued Chavez for expelling them from elected positions, Chavez filed a spurious libel lawsuit alleging $25 million in damages, far beyond what the farmworkers possessed. He later acknowledged this was an effort to intimidate the workers’ lawyer.
In 1981, during a factional fight for control of the union, Chavez also distributed a leaflet denouncing two Jewish members of the opposing faction as “the two Jews.” The leaflet said there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the union and Chavez’s wife, Helen, shouted death threats from the convention floor. The targets of the threats were supporters of UFW lawyers Marshall Ganz and Jerry Cohen.
The UFW collapses
During the 1980s, the UFW lost the vast majority of its contracts as thousands of workers left the union or voted for decertification. The political climate had shifted against the union, in the wake of the 1981 destruction of the PATCO strike by the Reagan administration, the isolation and defeat of militant struggles at Phelps Dodge Copper, Greyhound, Eastern Airlines, Hormel and dozens of other locations.
In California, Republican George Deukmejian won the governorship in 1982, and the state government passed to Republican Party control for the next 16 years, undermining the principal prop for the UFW, the corporatist structure established under the Agriculture Labor Relations Act. When disputes arose, the state automatically sided with the growers, and the union consistently capitulated.
As the UFW lost its dues base, it transformed itself from a union into a business under the banner of “Latino empowerment.” In the 1980s, the UFW opened a print shop and contracted with the Democratic Party to print mailers and newsletters for its candidates. Chavez made a secret agreement with millionaire real estate developer Celestino Aguilar to purchase foreclosed houses and flip them for profit. Aguilar and the UFW established American Liberty Investments to develop apartments in the Central Valley and set up the Ideal Minimart Corporation to construct strip malls and a check-cashing store. The UFW had become a housing vulture and central valley slumlord.
Millions of dollars in the UFW’s “Martin Luther King” pension plan were invested in Aguilar’s real estate developing projects, with Chavez’s younger brother Richard receiving millions in construction contracts. As Miriam Pawel writes in her book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, “By 1989, the Martin Luther King Jr. fund [MLK] was a private foundation with $8 million in principal, effectively accountable to no one but Cesar Chavez. Each year, MLK doled out between $600,000 and $700,000 to other UFW-related enterprises. Money earned by a generation of farmworkers, who had been told their sacrifice would provide services for all farmworkers, had become a subsidy for a growing bureaucracy increasingly removed from the fields.”
As his organization collapsed and lost legitimacy in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, Chavez spent the last years of his life charging almost $4,000 per event to speak at dozens of college campuses across the world. His speeches included calls for students to register to vote for the Democratic Party.
Today, conditions for the 2 to 3 million farmworkers are little changed from before the UFW emerged on the scene. Over half of all farmworkers are undocumented and the median income for all farmworkers is just $7,500 per year. Child labor is legal in agriculture, with 12-year-olds forced to work long days. Because most farmworkers are undocumented, they are not eligible for US social programs. Only 2 percent of farmworkers use Social Security, and less than 15 percent receive Medicaid.
Piece rate payment is legal under US labor law for agricultural workers, with orange pickers in Florida paid just 85 cents for each 90-pound box of oranges they fill. Federal minimum wage laws do not apply to one-third of farmworkers on smaller farms, and wage theft by foremen and growers is regular. Today, there are thousands of agricultural workers who are not paid for their work and are essentially modern slaves. Sexual harassment of female farmworkers is widespread.
Poor conditions are not just for farmworkers. Poverty in agricultural areas of the country has skyrocketed in recent years for all sections of the working class. According to the 2010 US Census, California’s Central Valley is one of the poorest regions of the US. Fresno is the second poorest metropolitan region of the US, while Bakersfield-Delano and Modesto are the fourth and fifth poorest. Each area was once a center of UFW activity. Meanwhile, profits for the California agricultural industry are reaching new records. In 2013, revenue reached $34 billion—the highest figure ever.
Conclusion
The development of a mass movement of agricultural workers independent of the corporatist unions and the two parties of big business today requires a critical appraisal of the myth of the UFW and Cesar Chavez. Farmworkers are entitled to feel proud of their past victories in struggles against California growers, the police, and the courts, but they should not confuse this with illusions in the legacy of the UFW or Cesar Chavez. What failed was not this or that tactical method, but the essentially pro-capitalist character of his program.
Farmworkers hold the key to an agricultural industry without which the economy of the world’s most powerful capitalist country cannot function. But the fight against inequality and poverty requires the building of a political movement that places central emphasis on the unity of migrant workers with not only their permanent resident and naturalized coworkers but with the American working class as a whole.
Today, the UFW is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Sacramento with a series of radio advertisements encouraging workers to register to vote to elect Democratic Party candidates from “our race.”
The racialism of “La Raza” and Latino nationalism, of which Chavez and the UFW are icons, only serves to divide the working class and keep it tied to a bankrupt political establishment controlled by the banks and corporations. Farmworkers have nothing in common with the wealthy and satisfied layers who preach of “racial unity” while supporting the Democrats and President Obama, who has deported over 2 million undocumented workers to the violence and poverty of Central and South America.
Obama’s anti-immigrant policies have created fertile conditions for the emergence of the fascistic campaign of Republican Donald Trump, whose proposal to deport all 11 million undocumented workers would require placing entire sections of the US under martial law. The increasingly prominent position played by anti-immigrant proposals during the primary elections of both parties underscores the very real danger facing immigrants if left defenseless and tied to the two parties of Wall Street.
The struggle to end the brutal exploitation and poverty of farmworkers requires the adoption of a socialist program, including the nationalization of the banks and major agribusiness corporations under workers control. This requires a conscious struggle for the international unity of the working class and the independence of the workers’ movement from the parties of the bourgeoisie.
